Is it possible to have respect for the poor and hungry?

 “There are many complex reasons why people go to food banks”

This was the British Prime Minister, Theresa May’s response to TV journalist Andrew Marr when asked whether it was right that nurses should have to use food banks.

Whatever the reasons the use of food banks is rising. In 2008, the number of people using food banks was just under 26,000. By 2017, that figure had risen to almost 1.2 million.

https://www.trusselltrust.org/news-and-blog/latest-stats/end-year-stats/

It is estimated that the UK is the 6^th largest economy in the World. It is a highly complex and developed economy and yet the Office for National Statistics estimates that around 6.5% of the population of the UK were in ‘persistent poverty’ in 2014. This amounted to 3.9 million people, the 12^th highest figure in the EU.

In 2016, over 93,000 households were assessed as homeless in England, Scotland and Wales. The number of people forced to sleep rough every night in England was 4,134, an increase of 16% since 2015.

The United Kingdom has persistent and long-term poverty leading to homelessness and hunger. The fact that these figures are rising suggests that the underlying causes, whether complex or not, are getting worse rather than better.

It is not overly emotional to argue that it is a national disgrace that we have people, many of whom are in work, forced to use food banks. Nor, is it rhetorical to describe as a national disgrace that each night over 4,000 people are forced to sleep in the streets. But, beyond this what does it say about the kind of society we live in that we are growing accustomed to endemic poverty?

The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights states in Article One that “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” The Declaration’s preamble starts “Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”

This treaty, to which the United Kingdom is a signatory, could not be clearer that we recognise an inherent dignity within human beings and commit to ensuring that all human beings, regardless of gender, ethnicity or any other considerations are entitled to be treated with dignity.

What this means in practice is that Governments should not be indifferent to the suffering of others or enact legislation which has the effect of dehumanising or infantilising individuals. Josiah Ober argues that dignity is so important that it should be considered as the third core value of democracy, alongside liberty and equality. He says that to treat somebody in a dehumanising or infantilising way is to undermine their dignity, and thereby to undermine one of the pillars of democracy.

Homeless is on the increase

Aurel Kolnai says that “to respect ‘Human Dignity’ is a strict moral obligation”. Now if you are the type of person who is likely to buy a copy of The Big Issue, make donations to a food bank, or give money to people begging on the street, you may feel that you are showing respect to the people concerned. Whilst it is certainly true that you are not deliberately disrespecting them (as those who refuse to acknowledge their existence do), what you are showing is compassion not respect.

The phrase mutual respect is often used in the philosophical literature. Richard Sennett notes that there is something reciprocal in respect that makes it mutual. It suggests that in respecting others, we will be respected ourselves. Respect and being respected clearly matters. Our certainty of our place in the World is shown, in part, by the respect we receive and the fact that others want our respect.

This turns on how we think of respect. In broad terms, we can describe respect as taking another seriously. In the terms of Immanuel Kant, we recognise them as ends in their own right and not just means. When we give money to somebody begging on the street or donate to a food bank are we taking seriously the recipients? Are we treating them as moral equals?

Just to be clear here I am not arguing that it is wrong to give money to people or donate food or indeed to be more pro-active in charity work. In a situation where 4,000 people tonight have nowhere to sleep but the streets, giving them a couple of quid to buy a hot drink or something to eat is the least those of us more fortunate can do. My argument is that it has little to do with respect.

Part of the problem is that the redistribution of our wealth to them is random. Most of us have a limited budget on which to decide whether we can afford to give money or food or not. This means that the money is entirely in our gift. It is an impulsive act of kindness which benefits some random individual at the expense of others who may be poorer or hungrier.

Those who give to charity would no doubt, if they could, solve the problems that cause poverty, hunger and homelessness. Random acts of kindness, whilst better than indifference, do not solve the complex social problems, although they may alleviate some of the symptoms.

By giving charity we are not creating a situation where people’s dignity is maintained. We are not engaging in an act of mutual respect. We are reacting compassionately to the suffering of another, but that other is not our equal in any sense of the word. To be reduced to a state of beggary is to be stripped of your personhood, of your dignity, of your ability to give respect and to be respected.

In a situation of growing poverty and its associated misery it is right that we are prepared to redistribute wealth and one way of achieving this is by those of us who can putting our hands in our pockets from time to time. But, unfortunately this does very little to redistribute wealth from the richest to the poorest or to increase the opportunity for the poor to gain the respect of their fellow citizens. It does not allow for the poor to become fully functioning citizens in their own right. In this way, rather than creating autonomous individuals we foster, all be it unwittingly, a dependency culture and support growing wealth inequality.

In 2016, according to official statistics, the richest 10% of households in the UK held 45% of the nation’s wealth. The poorest 50% owned just 8.7% of the wealth. This is not just a British problem of course. In a report published by Oxfam just prior to the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, it was estimated that the eight richest individuals in the World (all men incidentally) were worth a total of $426bn (£350bn), equivalent to the wealth of 3.6 billion people. Bill Gates, for example, has personal wealth of $87 billion. Meanwhile, people in dire poverty have to beg for the price of a cup of tea.

There is a strong moral case for alleviating individual poverty. There are stronger political reasons why we should care about structural poverty. Jewei Ci says that poverty has two obvious effects. First it affects the subsistence well-being of those denied biological needs for food, shelter etc. It is not the sign of a mature democracy to have citizens in such dire circumstances that they cannot take part in community life. But secondly, it also affects the psychological need for respect.

What he has in mind is what Stephen Darwall has called recognition respect. That is the recognition by our peers that we are a person with interests and a life worth living. It also affects the ability of people to take part in the reciprocal nature of mutual respect. Not because people in poverty are incapable of respecting others, but because their status is so low that they do not attract the respect of their fellow citizens.

It is easy to lose sight of the fact that many homeless, poor or hungry people have fallen through a safety net, whose holes seem to get bigger and bigger. They are not without status as a result of their own indolence, they are caught in a poverty trap which they are unable to escape.

These problems cannot be alleviated by the altruistic generosity of those who support charities. They are structural and require structural changes to society in order to put the opportunity to gain respect for every citizen before the interests of a tiny minority to accumulate ever more riches. At the very least at the national level it requires a government who rather than hiding behind meaningless rhetoric about ‘complex causes’ make it a political imperative to do something about inequality.

For those of us who are not members of government, nor ridiculously rich, our options are more limited. But there is a General Election taking place shortly in the UK. If we forget about some of the side issues (such as Brexit and whether the leader of the opposition is a ‘mugwump’) we should use whatever influence we can to raise the issue of poverty on to the political agenda. This means using social media to inform and question. It also means putting politicians on the spot when they go door knocking or appear in public.

In the meantime, we should continue to buy a couple of items extra in our weekly shop for the local food bank, we should give money to desperate people when we are able to and we should support the Big Issue sellers who are trying to escape poverty. But, in doing these things we should not lose sight of the fact that what those in poverty need is to be lifted from poverty, not simply have it alleviated.

Getting rid of poverty is not complex, though it might prove to be difficult. It is a question of having the political will to do so. When those candidates come knocking on your door, why not make your question “what will you do, if elected, to end the misery of poverty?”

References
Ci, Jewei (2013) 'Agency and other Stakes of Poverty' Journal of Political Philosophy, 21(2), 125-150
Crisis (2017) 'About homelessness'
Darwall, Stephen (1977) 'Two Types of Respect' Ethics, 88(1), 36-49
Equality Trust (2017) 'The Scale of Economic Inequality in the UK'
Kolnai, Aurel (1995) ‘Dignity’ in R S Dillon (editor) Dignity, Character and Self-respect (London: Routledge)
Ober, Joshia (2012) 'Democracy's Dignity' American Political Science Review, 106(4), 827-846
Office of National Statistics (2016) 'Persistent Poverty in the UK and EU: 2014'
Sennett, Richard (2003) Respect. The formation of character in an age of inequality (London: Allen Lane)    
Trussell Trust (2017) 'End of year stats'
United Nations (2017) 'Universal declaration of human-rights'

When did we lose our capacity for compassion?

When Katie Hopkins tweeted that she did not care that refugees were drowning in the Mediterranean, it was motivated mainly by her narcissistic desire to grab the headlines. But, in doing so, she revealed a callous indifference to the lives of other desperate individuals which, sadly, has a disturbing echo in modern British society. Whilst Hopkins received little support for her rant she remains employed by The Sun (Britain’s bestselling ‘newspaper’) and her views represent an extreme version of a culture in which compassion plays no obvious role.

Katie Hopkins tweeting without compassion

According to Nancy Snow (1991), compassion is a natural emotion which all of us are capable of feeling. It is “an altruistic concern for the other’s good”. Which prompts me to wonder how some people seem to be able to feel no compassion at all. 

I am not concerned so much with those, like Hopkins or Farage, who feign lack of compassion as part of some deluded political project, but rather the indifference that ordinary people are encouraged to show.

We are all now familiar with the phrase ‘compassion fatigue’. According to this theory we see so much suffering on our TV screens that we become desensitized to it. I’m sure there is something in this argument, but there also seems to be something else happening. Perhaps it is true, as Susan Moeller (1999) has said, that so-called ‘compassion fatigue’ has its origins in media-led ignorance.

It is tempting to over-estimate the impact of right wing tabloids. However, it is also possible to under-estimate the insidious nature of what amounts to a propaganda campaign. It is not entirely true as Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw (1972) once remarked that the media don’t tell us what to think but they do tell us what to think about. If they don’t tell us what to think they are the gatekeepers of what information we have access to. Although the internet is creating a different type of media playing field, I am not convinced that the role of the tabloid press has been significantly undermined. Television news and the tabloid press continue to set the political agenda.

What the media cannot do is override entirely our moral intuition. Compassion is linked to an altruistic concern for the well-being of others. James Griffin (1986) , in his book Well Being, makes the point that: “We all want to do something with our lives, to act in a way that gives them some point and substance.” What this means in practice is doing things that are not simply self-interested. But, does this mean that we should be concerned for the suffering of all others regardless of whether we are capable of intervening or not?

We act to help others both from altruistic impulses and from compassion. We see this idea that there is more to life than just narrow self-interest when we show concern for others and a willingness to act to help those who may be in need. How we react may be to give to charity, to write letters to the press or MPs or to simply fume at the TV. The point is that these acts are motivated by compassion and what Max Weber called verstehen often translated as empathetic understanding.

Three year old refugee Alan Kurdî died in September 2015

When the body of three-year-old Alan Kurdî was washed up on a Mediterranean beach in September 2015 it was possible to discern a serious shift in public attitudes toward refugees. The young Syrian died alongside his elder brother and mother trying to cross the Mediterranean whilst fleeing the Civil War in Syria. That picture of the young body still dressed in sneakers lying face down in the surf was so powerful that even refugee hating newspapers such as the Daily Mail could not do anything but show compassion (Daily Mail, 2015). Suddenly the human cost of the refugee crisis hit a compassionate nerve that even the Daily Mail could not ignore.

The issue here is not whether an isolated report is “sympathetic” to refugees, but rather the cumulative effect of years of media stories about immigrants “swamping” Britain or abusing our benefits system. Carlos Vargas Silva, an Oxford-based academic has exposed as 'pure, unsupported speculation' tabloid accusations that migrants are a drain on the state (New Internationalist, 2013). Unfortunately, few people read academic research but many people read tabloid newspapers. In this environment, our basic emotional impulse of compassion for those in trouble can be overwhelmed by an imagined consensus of hostility to these “others’. In such an environment defending immigration is made very difficult and for many people it is easier to ignore the arguments and their consequences and to simply keep their thoughts to themselves.

Tabloids are inherently anti-immigrant

There is a large body of opinion in Britain which is now opposed not simply to further immigration but also to those “immigrants” already here. This is not new. Since the turn of the century polls show that over three quarters of the public want immigration reduced (Duffy and Frere Smith, 2014). 

The positive contribution of migrants to our economy and our culture is overlooked. Politicians, who should set the moral agenda, find themselves unable to defend immigration and constantly cede ground to those whose agendas are to fuel hatred for the victims of political choices made by those who defend a system which causes the very conditions it condemns.

Behind the rhetoric there is a very real issue. More people are forcibly on the move currently than at any time since the Second World War ended. According to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR), around 65 million people have been forcibly displaced. Of this figure, 21 million are refugees which means that they cannot easily go back to where they came. The biggest number of refugees, almost 5 million, are from Syria (UNHCR, 2015). A further 3 million are from Afghanistan and around 1 million are from Somalia. In each case the wars causing the mass exodus have the support of Western governments who profit from their propagation.

The issue however is not just where refugees are from but where do they go? A 2016 study revealed that the UK public had very little understanding of either the scale of the problem worldwide or the effect locally. Most Britons estimated the number of Syrian refugees as 300,000 at a time when it was closer to 5 million. By the same token, they believed that 10,000 Syrians had settled in Britain. The actual figure was less than half of that number. To put this in plain terms the average Briton believed 1 in 30 Syrian refugees had ended up in the UK, when the true figure was closer to 1 in 1,000 (Guardian, 2016).

 Syrian refugees mostly stay close to home (http://www.wired.co.uk/article/europe-syria-refugee-crisis-maps)

There is also a confusion in people’s minds between immigrants and refugees. The former tend to be younger, often skilled workers attracted by employment opportunities. The latter are victims of war who are ‘temporarily’ displaced. As Dana Sleiman, spokeswoman in Lebanon for UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency has said: "Every refugee I talked to said that they would like to go back to Syria. In the ideal world, refugees want to go back to Syria as soon as they can. They wish to stay here [in Lebanon] not because they like it, but because they are close to home." (AlJazeera News, 2016)

The tabloid press in Britain, in common with some politicians, have created an environment of hostility toward immigration generally and refugees specifically. Child refugees had their ages questioned by the press which, in contravention of their own code of practice, published photographs of boys aged under 16 claiming they were a lot older and demanding medical tests to establish their age. There was no sense that these were young boys already traumatized by the war they were trying to escape. Indeed, many commentators on social media branded them as “would be terrorists”.

The lack of compassion shown by some sections of the media shows them for what they are as much as the compassion the rest of us show says something about us. Although the tabloids and certain politicians have been successful in creating a hostile anti-immigrant culture in Britain, this does not mean that we should no longer appeal to people’s sense of compassion. It is not just a question of numbers or whether immigrants add more value economically, but something more fundamental.

Perhaps the question we should be asking is not whether immigration is too high, or whether it is beneficial to the country, but rather what kind of society do we want to create? Compassion is a basic human impulse in response to the suffering of others. It relies on an acknowledgement that all persons should be respected. As Aurel Kolnai (1995) has said upholding people’s dignity is “a strict moral obligation”. We do it not just because it is right, although it is, but in recognition that we belong to what Jutten (2017) has called “a community of humans” and this “brings an entitlement to expect to be treated with dignity but also a duty to reciprocate”. In other words, if we want to be treated with dignity and respect, we start by doing the same to others, all others.

Compassion is a powerful emotion and accompanied by verstehen allows us to imagine what life might be like for people in desperate situations. Those who lose their sense of compassion in pursuit of their selfish, and often discriminatory, agendas do more than just create an environment of hatred and mistrust, they also undermine our very claims to be a humane society. To feel compassion involves putting yourself in the position of the victims. Of course, if we ask people in the UK to imagine themselves in the situation of desperate Syrians it is entirely hypothetical. But we should not forget it was hypothetical for the people of Syria prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in 2011.

References

AlJazeera News, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/05/syrian-refugees-europe-160504111600535.html

Daily Mail, (2015) "ISIS use photo of tragic Syrian toddler Aylan in a sick propaganda article warning brutally oppressed Muslims not to flee the jihadis". Daily Mail 10 September 2015

James Griffin (1986) Well Being. Its meaning, measurement and moral importance (Oxford: Clarendon)

Guardian (2016) ‘Syrian Refugee Crisis Underestimated by British Public Finds Humanitarian Study’. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/apr/22/syrian-refugee-crisis-underestimated-by-british-public-finds-humanitarian-study

Tim Jutten (2017) ‘Dignity, Esteem, and Social Contribution: A Recognition-Theoretical View’ The Journal of Political Philosophy

Aurel Kolnai (1995) ‘Dignity’ in R S Dillon (editor) Dignity, Character and Self-respect (London: Routledge)

Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw (1972) ‘The agenda setting function of mass media’ Public opinion quarterly, Vol.36(2), pp.176-187

Susan D Moeller (1999) Compassion Fatigue. How the media sell disease, famine, war and death (New York & London: Routledge)

New Internationalist (2013) Immigration untruths New Internationalist, Oct 1, 2013

Duffy and Frere Smith (2014 Perception and Reality: Public attitudes to immigration Ipsos MORI Social Research Institute https://www.ipsos-mori.com/DownloadPublication/1634_sri-perceptions-and-reality-immigration-report-2013.pdf

Nancy Snow (1991) ‘Compassion’ American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3 pp. 195-205

UNHCR, 2015 Figures at a glance http://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html